Karl Marx—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Capitalist Potential and Revolution

The relation between Karl Marx and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri turns on a shared wager and a consequential disagreement: whether capitalism’s own development prepares the means of its supersession, or whether the antagonism that frustrates its productive power is also what sustains that power. Hardt and Negri recast Marx’s revolutionary possibility for an economy organized around immaterial labor and the common; the book argues that their confidence in this transition inherits a Marxian faith in historical progress while repeating a mistake about capitalism’s inner obstacle.

Marx’s inheritance and the question of potential

Hardt and Negri begin from a proposition they attribute to Marx: highly organized corporate capitalism is already a kind of socialism within capitalism. As ownership becomes more nominal and absent owners less necessary to production, the system appears to contain, in advance, conditions for its own reversal. The political task can then seem like a formal conversion: remove the nominal head, and an already socialized productive process can be put to collective use.

Their account also revises the historical setting of Marx’s argument. They contend that Marx’s concept of general intellect remained associated with centralized planning because he was writing amid mechanically organized industrial labor. In their view, the rise of immaterial labor makes a different reversal objectively possible. The book’s criticism is not that Marx’s analysis of capitalism is useless to them, but that they carry forward its developmental confidence: capitalism produces capacities that seem to point toward a new social order, while its existing form prevents those capacities from being fully realized.

Immaterial labor, the common, and democracy

Hardt and Negri describe immaterial labor as spanning intellectual or symbolic work, such as producing ideas, codes, texts, and programs, and affective work, which deals with people’s physical and emotional lives, as in the work of doctors, babysitters, and flight attendants. They call this labor hegemonic not because it is quantitatively dominant, but because it gives its characteristic structure to the wider economy, as large-scale industry did in Marx’s account of nineteenth-century capitalism.

What this labor produces, on their reading, extends beyond goods and services. It also produces cooperation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships. These shared capacities constitute the common: knowledge and cooperative relations that cannot be adequately enclosed within private property. Because immaterial production makes social relations themselves an immediate product, its cooperation is already contained in the labor process. Hardt and Negri therefore see producers as increasingly able to manage production without owners, whose role becomes progressively superfluous.

They name democracy as the common denominator of emancipatory movements and present absolute democracy—everyone ruling themselves together—as an answer to continuing conflict and war. In this account, the multitude’s emergence within capitalism makes a democracy previously constrained by sovereign state power possible for the first time. The relation to Marx is thus not merely that both accounts value collective production: Hardt and Negri locate a new political possibility in the social cooperation capitalism itself now generates.

The obstacle that produces what it limits

The book questions whether Hardt and Negri’s self-ruling multitude is less a break with capitalism than capitalism’s own fantasy of unrestricted self-revolution. Capitalism does generate proliferating collective capacities, but it contains them within the capitalist form. The crucial question is whether the appropriation of surplus-value is simply an external restraint on productive cooperation or the formal condition that organizes and propels it.

This challenge extends to Marx’s account of capitalism’s dynamic. Marx recognized the extraordinary expansion of productivity and the way capitalism continually revolutionizes its material conditions; he also recognized that capital’s own antagonism repeatedly turns this development into a flight from crisis. The book argues that he nevertheless inferred that communism could preserve and raise this self-expanding productivity by freeing it from its capitalist impediment. That inference overlooks the possibility that the impediment is simultaneously a condition of possibility: abolishing it might not release the same productive potential, but dissipate the potential it seemed to obstruct. Hardt and Negri’s expectation that the common can be liberated from the old social form repeats this problem when it treats capitalism’s productive momentum as separable from the antagonism organizing it.

The disagreement is framed through a parallax logic: opposed dimensions can be mutually implicated without becoming directly translatable into one another. A political struggle cannot simply mirror economic interests, and economic production cannot be reduced to a secondary expression of politics. Likewise, the contradiction within capitalism need not be resolved by removing one side and retaining the other. The book’s criticism of a clean passage from capitalist cooperation to absolute democracy rests on this refusal to treat the contradiction as an incidental obstacle to an otherwise intact potential.

The commodity form and Marx’s more complex method

The book’s reading of Marx also resists reducing his method to a simple opposition between deceptive exchange and truthful production. It describes Marx’s analysis of value as a parallax account: value must be understood through production and circulation, rather than by declaring one domain real and the other merely illusory. Later Marxist approaches, the book argues, often lost this perspective by elevating production as the site of truth and treating exchange and consumption as distractions that obscure it.

Marx’s analysis of the commodity instead asks why labor takes the form of value and labor-time the form of the magnitude of value. A wooden table remains an ordinary useful object, yet as a commodity it assumes a social form in relation to other commodities; its value is not simply a natural property lodged in the wood. The book stresses that this form is essential, not a superficial disguise to be stripped away in search of a more substantial truth underneath. That emphasis complicates any straightforward appeal to Marx as a theorist of productive forces waiting to be released: the social form through which production becomes intelligible is part of the problem, not a removable cover over an untouched productive core.

Revolution and the danger of a guaranteed outcome

The book’s account of the October Revolution supplies a broader historical caution about treating revolutionary potential as a promise of uncomplicated emancipation. Drawing on Sheila Fitzpatrick, it distinguishes the emergency of 1917–21 from the consolidation of Soviet state power during the New Economic Policy period. The radical transformation of society, in this account, came with collectivization and rapid industrialization beginning in 1928: peasants were liquidated as a class of individual owners, and an older intelligentsia was replaced. A person returning to Moscow in 1924 might still have recognized its shops, offices, theaters, and many of its leaders; by 1934, the texture of social life had changed so profoundly that the city would no longer have been recognizable in the same way.

Fitzpatrick places the end of the revolutionary sequence in 1937, when the purges were cut short and the Party nomenklatura stabilized as a new class. Isaac Deutscher’s account, also invoked by the book, interprets forced collectivization and industrialization as an inward turn: with the revolution confined to the Soviet Union, internal transformation substituted for its expansion abroad, and the liquidation of the kulaks for the overthrow of bourgeois rule elsewhere. The book insists on holding together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome, rejecting both the idea that Stalinism was merely a contingent deviation and the claim that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. This history does not serve as a direct account of Hardt and Negri’s position; it sharpens the article’s central problem by showing why revolutionary potential and the form taken by its historical realization cannot be treated as separate matters.